Film looks at democracy's messes

Jason Smith wants to take election fraud from the voter screen to the big screen.

The 47-year-old Los Angeles resident has worked in the entertainment industry for 25 years as a writer and actor and is the man behind “ I Voted?” a one-man documentary that he hopes will shine a light on just how unreliable some of the voting systems are in the United States.

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“We are engaged in faith-based voting,” Smith told POLITICO. “We have faith that the system works. We consider ourselves the gold standard of democracy. … And I’m simply asking, if that’s the case, why are we not protecting democracy here at home because we do not offer guarantees of accuracy and security on elections through the country.”

He was inspired by Alvin Greene, the Democratic Party’s nominee in the 2010 U.S. Senate election in South Carolina whose success in the primary was attributed, by some, to faulty voting machines.

“I started opening up the hood on the engine of democracy, the vote in the rest of the country, and I thought that the answers were very disturbing with regards to the accuracy and security of ballots in American elections,” Smith said. “Twenty-four percent of the country uses these paperless systems that can’t be audited and can’t be recounted.”

“Elections are a matter of national security, and if we can agree on that, then there absolutely is a role for the federal government to play and that would be establishing minimum floors that would include a mandate for a durable record of voter marked intent and mandated audits. And if we did those things — those very simple, cost-effective things — then we would have dramatically improved elections today.”

He knows, however, that the task isn’t easy. “There are no pinpoint solutions to elections. It’s not as if we just did one specific thing, then we would improve our elections. Voting presents more than a technical challenge. There are legal issues, accessibility issues and human fallibility.”

And it’s also a topic that isn’t exactly “sexy” in political and media circles.

“I don’t think there’s real momentum behind the stuff that I’m talking about right now,” Smith said. “There would be if there were some kind of significant event along the lines of a Senate race that went haywire or another Bush v. Gore.”

Smith’s reporting includes interviews with election officials, legislators, computer scientists, journalists and academics. He’s currently in the post-production stage of the process and is trying to get more funding for the film, which he hopes will get theatrical distribution next summer, before the midterm elections.

“I’m hoping that a film like this will open people’s eyes to what I think is a very significant issue that threatens our democracy,” Smith said. “While democracy certainly doesn’t begin with elections, it can end with them.”